How I cancelled my Spotify subscription

I'm not gonna go into why Spotify is bad. I assume if you're reading this you are vaguely aware that Spotify is bad and feel a bit guilty for using it anyway. It's convenient. It's what you're used to. It's nice to have whatever music you wanna listen to just there, across all your devices.

(ok ok, let's have a sidebar on why they're bad. They bad because you pay them money or listen to ads, and then they take that money and they pay it to their founder (who is evil), or to the other shareholders (ie, the record labels who got sweetheart deals early on), or to Joe Rogan (do I need a parenthesis here), or on developing AI music generation features. And a little bit to the artists you actually care about, but less than any of their competitors.)

So what should you do instead? Well the straightforward choice would be to instead subscribe to one of their competitors. I hear good things about Tidal!

But the systemic structure is still the same, even if artists get paid a little more. It's still based on streams, it's still based on some algorithmic process, it's still based on money flowing through the large company to ??? and then maybe someone gets paid for making the music but probably not enough to make a living off it unless they're super famous and don't need your money anyway.

So I'm going to lay out what I did, in the knowledge that it's a bunch more work. I think it was worth it, but admittedly that's in large part because I seem to like this kind of fuss. Other people report feeling more connected and mindful about what they listen to. Your mileage may vary! But it's worth knowing it's possible

Step 1 - Cancel your subscription

For me this was complicated because I had a shared plan with my friend Eleanor. But I spoke to her about it and she said she was also thinking of doing the same. So we both cancelled.

Step 2 - It doesn't end immediately

Yeah, it's a monthly plan so you can cancel and then figure out how you're gonna listen to music from this point on. It also means you can use some shady services you find on Github to connect to your Spotify account and rip high quality MP3s of all the tracks you have on your playlists.

(These programs then stopped working for me, so I will not link them. But they do exist, and you might be able to make them work.)

The thing that's difficult about moving away from a streaming model is that you don't have music of your own any more. You don't have a big pile of CDs in your bedroom or a folder with loads of messily/meticulously organised MP3s. You just have a sidebar full of playlists. But I am here to say - you can take them with you.

Step 3 - Playing MP3s on your computer

There are programs you can download which will allow you to play MP3s on your computer. And there are programs which will allow you to view your music library and make playlists, and then play those playlists. You want the second type of program.

Again, frustratingly, I don't have specific advice to give you here. I wish I could say: here is the good one, download this and it will just work and will not annoy you. But I can't. It's a niche thing now, and everyone has their own weird tastes, and most of the software that people have put craft and time into they are charging for. Which I'm not against, but also I don't want to pay them $50 so I can use their thing when I don't know that their particular tastes align with mine.

(Sidebar on AI: I looked like a year ago, when I quit Spotify, so this was before the rise of vibecoding really got going. This, like note-taking, is exactly the kind of rabbithole that will tempt a particular type of person into vibecoding their own perfect music library/player. Probably it'll work quite well, for their specific needs. And then some of them will publish it, and it won't work as well for anyone else. If you hate AI, consider yourself warned)

What did I do? I nostalgically remembered the software I used to use and love, foobar2000. I, as I have many times before, wished it had a Mac version. I looked again. It did. I went down a rabbithole to configure it just right. It's still not great, it's still in development. You can't press the spacebar to pause or start a song. Every time you add a song to the playlist the scroll position is lost. I cannot in good faith recommend this software. But I still like it.

Step 4 - Playing MP3s when you are out and about

I have been on a kick of unbundling all the things I use my phone for onto separate devices. I would like to claim that it's because I'm trying to be mindful, because it means I use social media less, that I am generally a more virtuous person, stepping free of the fuss and bother of modern life. But actually I have to admit, it's because I like a gadget.

So, I decided to buy an MP3 player. I went into a research hole and feverishly researched options. Several days later I emerged with the conviction that I should buy a Shanling M0s. It cost about £60. The courier delivered it, according to the delivery photo, over the wall of my downstairs neighbour's garden. I raised a dispute. I argued over the dispute. I lost the dispute. I ordered a second one. This arrived fine.

What's it like to use? It's pretty nice! It's dinky enough to just leave in your pocket or bag without thinking about it, and tough enough that it doesn't mind if that's the same place your keys are in. Battery lasts a long time, it sounds good, it takes a MicroSD card so the storage is plentiful. The interface, however, is crying out for some homebrew alternative. It has a physical dial on the side but you can't use it to scrub through your library, instead you have to use the tiny touchscreen. But it works, it indexes stuff fine, you can load playlists onto it.

However! The other route, which might appeal to you more, is that you can just use an old iPod. They made shit-tons of them, and they were solidly built, so most of those are still working. There's signs of some retro trend that's gonna make them expensive in a few years, like Gameboys are now, but it's not yet properly bitten. And if you want it to have a new battery, or solid-state storage, or USB3 or Bluetooth support - there are mods you can get for that, either that you install yourself or that you buy pre-modded.

Instead of all this, you can also find some kind of media player that works on your phone. Either one where you have to download MP3s, or something with some kind of local server setup, maybe on Jellyfin? idk, I haven't done this bit. Definitely doable, though.

Step 5 - how do you listen to new music?

Okay! So we have the playlists we were listening to on Spotify. And we can listen to them at home or when we're out. But... new music comes out, and it's nice to listen to that, too. Like maybe your friend tells you about this collab someone they're into has done with a bagpipe player. And you're like... this is great. I wanna listen to this repeatedly.

Well, the good news is that they shared that with you by sending a Bandcamp link. And you can then use Bandcamp to buy the album digitally. It's £9, which is approximately what I was paying Spotify every month previously. I just did the math, and it turns out I've spent approximately £9 per month on Bandcamp since quitting Spotify just over a year ago.

The only downside is that I keep getting tempted into buying CDs. Not always, but if they're only a few quid more... why not, hey? The answer is because I don't have anything convenient to play them with, and where do I put them? I mean, obviously I also get the digital download, and they're a nice object. But I need to stop acquiring nice objects I don't have a use for.

Step 6 - how do you find that new music?

So one thing that Spotify also does is it does "discovery". Which means it gives you new things to listen to, that you weren't looking for. I used to like listening to my Discover Weekly. I found stuff I liked that way! But in recent years I found myself not engaging with those features. I definitely turned off the thing where it just continues with music, doing that radio thing of continuing to play stuff in vaguely the same vibe. No judgement if you like that! Different people listen to music in different ways, use it for different things.

I do believe, though, that better than finding new music you like is finding music in a way where the experience of listening to it, of caring about it, is shared with people you care about. Sure, I like that bagpipe album above. But I like it more because I was able to tell my friend - ah, this is my shit, I've been wanting to find more folk-y stuff like this where the groove kind of continues through the whole thing, where they're doing something interesting with the texture. And then they got excited and sent me more things to listen to. It's good to be in a community.

And failing that - I just listen to a lot of NTS. If you can't have community with people you know and love, you can have the simulacrum of it with people who are paid to present a radio show you like. I still get a bit of that warm feeling when I put on the Beth Orton album Superpinkymandy and know that I got into it because Flo Dill played the opening track, Don't Wanna Know About Evil, a lot on her breakfast show.

Step 7 - how do you listen to old music?

And then sometimes, for no reason you can discern, you get a fragment of a song in your head and then you're like... damn, I should listen to Streetlight Manifesto's seminal 2003 album, Everything Goes Numb. How do you do this?

Well the immediate and disappointing answer is that you can just go onto Youtube and play it. If it's like, one song, you just wanna hear it, it's probably on there and you can listen to it. But then either you have ads, or you pay them some money, or you have to fuck around and set up an adblocker, but then that doesn't work on your phone unless you're in the browser, and one specific browser at that...

And actually, Streetlight Manifesto was a big part of your teenage years, you want to actually have these songs available whenever this strange mood takes you. Now, I know it is possible to buy this music. I just looked it up and I could get a new vinyl pressing of it for like £30 (Who knew they were doing new pressings?!). But I don't have a record player either. Or you could pay for a digital download, looks like Qobuz does it for about a tenner. But actually what I did was... I pirated it. Sorry Tomas Kalokny.

It turns out that the way to pirate music in the year 2026 is pretty much identical to the way I pirated music when I was a teenager. You download Soulseek, you share your music library, and then you search for a song and you download it. I pretty much always find the thing I'm looking for, in the format I'm looking for, and have it downloaded within a minute or two.

Now, where you want to draw the line between music that you pirate and music that you pay for — that's up to you to decide. I do feel guilty for some of the music I download without paying for! I want artists to get paid. But I also think that it is better for artists, as a whole, if I am spending about a tenner a month on Bandcamp rather than a tenner a month on Spotify. And I also think that streaming music this way is a trap - the money you might have been spending on building a music library which would include this stuff is instead going to Daniel Ek et al. So when you leave you don't have access to the back catalogue you might have, even if you do rip your playlists. And the alternative ways music might once have circulated - mix tapes and lent records and stuff like that - those happen less, because now people just send Spotify links instead.

Except, if you want the latest Trá Pháidín album on CD, I can lend you that.